Campus copyright battle moves to textbook torrents

College students are comfortable with file sharing and uncomfortable with the …

The RIAA's extensive campaign against filesharing has drawn in a lot of individuals, but college campuses have remained a major target of the content owners' legal threats. It's pretty clear that there's significant expertise with filesharing on college campuses, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that this expertise has been put to use with other copyrighted materials. Textbook companies are getting worried about the sharing of their bread-and-butter online, and have started a campaign designed to block the sharing at its source.

Textbook Torrents (catchphrase: "because you can't torrent beer") is one of the sites mentioned in a report by The Chronicle of Higher Education, and its administrators clearly view themselves as providing a public good. The site's rules page exhorts users who've saved money by downloading texts there to go out and spend the equivalent money on a scanner. "Scan as many of your other textbooks as you can, and put them up here for others to benefit from," it reads. "There aren't very many scanned texts out there, so let's change that." Anyone who manages to find all their books through the site are encouraged to go out and buy a text simply to contribute it to TT's collection.

The site urges users to contribute as much as they get with a somewhat ironic exhortation: "Karma will pay you back, sooner or later." Indeed, it apparently has. The front page announces that they've recently had to pull a number of torrent links due to a request from Pearson Education, an academic publisher. Although the administrator suggested the request was on "extremely shaky legal ground," the announcement included a vow to prevent the server logs from becoming public, suggesting that TT is aware that it's abetting activities that could land people in legal hot water. This is also clear from the fact that they reject access from IP addresses identified in Peer Guardian's database of copyright enforcement groups.*

Also mentioned was the Scribd online document sharing service. A quick search for the term "Genetics" revealed a variety of copyrighted materials there, ranging from Genetics for Dummies up to all 1,367 pages of Genetics: Principles and Analysis. Scribd takes a very different view of copyright than Textbook Torrents, promising to remove any content that is uploaded without the copyright holder's permission and banning users that repeatedly run afoul of that rule. Still, it's very clear that, in the absence of Scribd being notified of infringing materials, these sorts of violations proliferate.

So far, publishers have largely acted on an ad hoc basis and targeted the sites making the material available, rather than the students themselves. They also seem to be content with takedown requests, rather than more aggressive legal actions. The lack of more aggressive action, however, may be the result of the relatively small magnitude of the problem. In contrast to ripping an MP3, scanning a textbook is a major task that requires a significant personal involvement, placing it beyond the attention span of many college students.

That barrier to the availability of the material is unlikely to last. More publishers are working to make their materials available to universities in electronic form; the Genetics text mentioned above appears to have been a professionally prepared PDF. As access to electronic texts increases, problems with their sharing will likely rise in parallel.

*Update: This statement has since been removed from the site's FAQ, and its administrators claim that this practice ended a while ago.